So this post begins, as most of my admittedly infrequent posts do, with my having read two things in serendipetous succession (I give thanks for Google Reader).

1. A boing boing post on Thanksgiving Masking
2. A Guardian article on the Brits' beffuddlement on the whole gestalt of American Thanksgiving

The Thanksgiving Masking post got me thinking about how the whole concept and experience of American Thanksgiving has changed over time. Each generational shift adding to a glowing patina of nostalgia, and depending upon one's history, pretentiousness and proclivities, a soupcon of self-criticism and free-floating guilt/anxiety.

And the Guardian article got me thinking about how the Pilgrims' survival and the idea of a harvest holiday is both insufficient and not all that logical (as harvest time is really more an late September/early October event in the American Northeast) explanation for a holiday or it's lasting hold on the American psyche.

What if, as the Guardian article suggests, there must be another explanation - what could it be, how does it relate both to the Pilgrim experience and the ongoing experience of successive generations of Americans? Let me hazard another set of explanations - unencumbered by any rigorous research.

So, you're a Pilgrim. You have survived a year of hardship and privation with not much more than your faith, your luck, your family, your fellow Pilgrims and the fact that you are so beaten down that you aren't inspiring the locals to see you as too much of a threat, to keep you alive. What do you have to look forward to as November draws to a close? I'll tell you -- more hardship and privation against the backdrop of an impending harsh winter surrounded by the same idiot zealots (and yes, you are one of them) who got you into this mess. Frankly with my modern American mind, I'm thinking that the very things that have been sustaining you are also constraining and threatening you, to wit, your faith, your family, your fellow Pilgrims.

What you need to do in this situation is to recommit yourself to the whole Pilgrim project. And, let me tell you, the whole Pilgrim project needs you to recommit to it, and pronto. Otherwise, game over. So, you and your fellow Pilgrims do what human beings in this situation have always done; you go tribal. You go with your faith, your family, your fellow Pilgrims and your God to that really ancient double-down form of social cohesion. You scrounge up as much food as you can, you light a big fire, you festoon what social structure you have with great meaning and import, and you tell stories.

You talk about your glorious history, the essential rightness of the path you are following, the need to press on, the need for singular purpose. You talk of the power of your God, the miracle of your survival and the need to walk the true path. You talk of the promise that this is the beginning of great things.

You do this to prevent or at least minimize your fellow Pilgrims from killing each other, running off in despair, becoming a blight on your struggling society, or worse still, forming splinter sects. You go tribal to define your tribe and keep your tribe together.

Ok, so that could explain the timing. What about the lasting hold the holiday has on the American psyche?

In a nation who's founding myth is greatly informed by by the claim that it is "a shining city on a hill," a beacon that draws immigrants from other places, we need a renewable way to define, re-interpret, redefine and recommit to the American project. It's really very simple. We are a modern echo of that same tribalism. The idea that we are a pluralist society makes the holiday so much more important. We are not just gathering with our tribe, we are asserting that the tribe of our experience is a part of the greater whole that is the mythic America. That's why the holiday not only persists, it has thrived.

And the self-criticism, the vague feeling of guilt at having survived or even prospered when others equally deserving have not, doesn't that make the ritual more essential? And doesn't it make the whole "recommit to the America project" ever timely, essential and more poignant?

Have a Happy Thanksgiving.